Magazine honors 5 mom-friendly firms

JANET KIDD STEWARTCHICAGO TRIBUNE

What is it about bankers that makes them want to enter contests?

Financial and professional service firms dominated Working Mother's list of 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers this year, taking up 41 of the spots. Five local financial firms--ABN Amro North America, Allstate Insurance Co., Bank One Corp., Household International Inc. and Northern Trust Co.--made the list.

The magazine doesn't disclose how many companies compete for the annual rankings, but Chief Executive Carol Evans said financial firms do account for a big portion of the "hundreds" that apply.

"Here's a case where the pipeline worked," she said, referring to the long-held mantra that given enough women in lower management, eventually some of them would make it to the top. She noted that 40 percent of Bank One's top salary earners are female. (The bank's workforce as a whole is 70 percent female.)

If reducing turnover among a workforce heavily dominated by women is the reason to add benefits and apply for awards, there may be an even bigger side benefit: The magazine shortly will unveil a study by a Cornell University professor showing companies that made the list also outperformed competitors in market-share growth.

While the winners all have impressive lists of family-friendly benefits (every banker in town with kids knows about Northern's on-site day-care facility), it's worth noting that the more subtle, and probably less costly, ones are the most important to many working parents.

Sarah McClelland is Bank One's chief auditor by day and a suburban mother of two boys, ages 12 and 14, by night. Her ability to climb the ladder without tearing her hair out got a big boost from her husband, Mick, a former manager at General Motors Corp. who left his career to stay home with the boys when the couple moved to Chicago for her job.

But for the bank's part in creating a leg up, she said, attitude made the biggest difference.

"Really feeling valued is a huge help," she said. "The people here want me to be able to make this work."

Lessons learned: And as long as we're asking questions, whoever said bankers lack a sense of humor?

Answering an online strategy question at a retail banking conference on Sept. 23, Bank One's Charles Scharf poked fun at Wingspan, the bank's failed run at a stand-alone Internet banking unit that was scuttled in 2001. Good lessons were learned from that, he said after quipping, "We obviously proved beyond a shadow of a doubt it would be singularly unsuccessful."

Better late than never? Insurance professionals from around the country gathering at the downtown Wyndham Hotel this week will hear a speech titled, "The Need to Return to Stronger Underwriting." A brochure promises to "pull back the covers on the industry numbers to expose how we got into the trouble we were in and why pricing our product at less than what is absolutely needed to generate an underwriting profit is folly, given the increasing number of variables we face."